Laura Miller Read Free Page A

Wardrobe
. I’ve read both towering masterpieces and less exalted novels that, when it comes to felicity of craftsmanship, thoroughly trounce any of Lewis’s fiction. But none of these is my Magician’s Book, the story to which all other stories must be compared.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
my introduction to Narnia, is that book for me, not merely because of its form or style or historical significance, but because of how it made me feel, which is at heart the fundamental question with any work of fiction. In the right light,
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
will always be the best book I’ve ever read.
    Why is this so? Many of the answers lie with its author, a man whom the critic William Empson (ideologically unsympathetic to Lewis in almost every way) characterized as “the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” Much of this reading, and many of Lewis’s own life experiences, make themselves felt in the Chronicles, as we would expect of any writer striving to bring his full talent to the task. He did not think any less of the work because it was intended for children, or any less of his readers because they were young. Lewis was cognizant of reading, the moment when the words of the writer mingle with the mind of the reader, as a kind of duet, with the reader bringing as much, in her own way, to the union as the writer. Here, from
An Experiment in Criticism,
is a remarkable description of the act of reading:
    [If the] dance is devised by a master, the rests and movements, the quickenings and slowings, the easier and the more arduous passages, will come exactly as we need them; we shall be deliciously surprised by the satisfaction of wants we were not aware of till they were satisfied. We shall end up just tired enough and not too tired, and “on the right note.” It would have been unbearable if it had ended a moment sooner — or later — or in any different way. Looking back on the whole performance, we shall feel that we have been led through a pattern or arrangement of activities which our nature cried out for. . . . The relaxation, the slight (agreeable) weariness, the banishment of all our fidgets, at the close of a great work all proclaim that it has done us good.
    Dance is the metaphor he chooses and, as Yeats observed, it is impossible to distinguish the dancer from the dance. Accordingly, if I want to write about the meanings of Narnia, then one aspect of the story must be personal; Lewis’s children’s fiction played an important role in my early life, so much so that I could never be the least bit objective about it. Some of what I have to say can only be demonstrated by my own experiences. Therefore, to quote Lewis again, “I must here be autobiographical for the sake of being evidential.” Literary value
is
personal, after all, because somebody — a person — needs to experience it as a reader for it to exist at all.
    But my history with Narnia is not idiosyncratic, and so I’ve also occasionally included interviews I conducted with writers and people who responded to my first essay about
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
published on Salon.com. Conversations with other readers have always been essential to the growth of my own literary understanding, and I suspect this is true for most other critics as well. But for some reason convention has dictated that we seldom mention these exchanges when writing about books. I’ve tried to correct that omission here.
    In the concluding volume of the Chronicles,
The Last Battle,
Lewis wrote of a place that “was far larger than it seemed from the outside.” Although this book will wend its way through the life and thoughts of Lewis and his friends (especially his close friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien), my own life and thoughts, the memories and feelings of other readers, the history and literature of Britain and of Ireland and the mythical taproots of humanity, all of